Nous sommes tous nés polyglottes (1991)
A combative essay published by Éditions Fixot in 1991, written in collaboration with Loïc Sellin. Tomatis defends a thesis that has the knack of irritating the French-speaking world as much as it delights the learners of languages: we are all born polyglot, but our ear progressively locks itself within the frequencies of our mother tongue, which renders access to other languages painful. Auditory re-education — through the Electronic Ear — makes it possible to recover this universal “ethnic ear”. A revolution for the teaching of modern languages.
“The only ‘miraculous’ aspect of language — that is to say, the inexplicable aspect in its raison d’être — is the innateness of speech. But this innateness is universal. It therefore establishes no hierarchy among men.”
— Introduction
Presentation
1991: English is imposing itself everywhere in Europe, French is in retreat, and the French — Tomatis maintains — take refuge behind the myth of the “gift for languages” to excuse their persistent monolingualism. Yet this gift does not exist as a reserved privilege: “we are all born polyglot”. The infant indeed has at his disposal an auditory pass-band considerably wider than that of the adult. He can hear — and therefore reproduce — the phonemes of all human languages. What condemns him to monolingualism is the progressive locking of his ear within the characteristic frequencies of his mother tongue.
Tomatis’s contribution holds in a single concept: the ethnic ear. Each language possesses a characteristic pass-band: 1,000–2,000 Hz for French, 2,000–4,000 Hz for British English, 80–12,000 Hz for Russian (the widest ear in Europe). When a French speaker attempts to learn English, his ear does not hear the high frequencies proper to that language; he can therefore neither reproduce them correctly nor analyse them correctly. The result: his ear is “closed” to English.
The solution is not pedagogical but physiological: to widen the pass-band of the learner’s ear to the frequencies of the target language. This is what the Electronic Ear does. Audio-vocal exercises lead in a few weeks to a profound change of phonetic control. The subject acquires the phonetic posture — and even the psychological posture — necessary to the foreign language, whatever pedagogical method may otherwise be in use.
Contents
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Introduction — the “rout” of French, the myth of the gift for languages.
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The infant’s ear, a universal ear — what a baby can hear.
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Imprisonment within the mother tongue — how the ear progressively closes.
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The ethnic ear — pass-bands of the principal European languages (French, English, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish).
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The Electronic Ear in the service of languages — protocols, duration, results.
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Testimonies and clinical cases — engineers, diplomats, students.
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Towards a complementary pedagogy — how to integrate filtered listening into a classical pedagogical apparatus.
Place in the work
This work extends and completes, for the general public, the research published as early as the 1960s (cf. L’Effet Tomatis et l’Oreille Électronique pour l’acquisition des langues vivantes, 1960, already available on this site). It belongs to the general-audience quartet of 1988–1991: Les Troubles scolaires (1988, schooling), Neuf mois au paradis (1989, prenatal), Pourquoi Mozart ? (1991, music) and Nous sommes tous nés polyglottes (1991, languages). Four key books for four key publics.
In brief
Indispensable reading for every teacher of foreign languages, for every expatriate confronted with the acoustic wall of a new language, for every student exhausting himself on the English “th” or the Russian “ы”. Tomatis brings to bear a simple physiological explanation for a block that decades of pedagogy have been unable to lift. To be placed in the library of any self-respecting language school, alongside the Common European Framework of Reference, which it usefully complements.
Available in libraries — BnF, Sudoc.